Arming prison officers

I heard on the radio this morning that prison officers
are calling for better protection against violent prisoners.

Currently, I understand there are 19 attacks on prison
staff every single day in British prisons. Understandably, those on the
receiving end of it want to be able to protect themselves from such attacks.

The suggestion is that prison officers be armed with
taser guns and CS spray in addition to the batons they already carry, which
many seem to feel is inadequate. In addition, they want stab vests and body
worn cameras. The last is presumably to deter violence against them and capture
evidence of it when it does occur.

You can understand why they would want such protection
when you hear stories of prisoners attacking each other over the most minor
provocation and prison officers having to step in to break up the ensuing mess.
As one anonymous prison officer says, "I've
seen it first hand where a prisoner has attacked another prisoner with a razor
blade over a packet of tobacco. If you're on your own and you see something
like that, which we did, you could be trying to split 15 to 20 blokes up."

Prison officers are reporting serious stress that leads
them to drink to excess to cope, another prison officer told the BBC, "I hate it. And I just hope that at end
of day I come away in one piece. I didn't drink before. But I drink most days
just to get through. When I'm on holiday, I'm fine. [I drink] a lot, too much.
Probably a bottle of spirits a night. Then we get up in the morning and pretend
nothing is wrong as we have to put on a front."

The violence in prisons may well be related to drug
abuse, which now seems to be rife with prison offers reporting three or four
drug related incidents every day leading to ambulances being called to deal
with the casualties.

With respect to the prison officers calling for new
weapons I think they are barking up the wrong tree. Dolling out violence to control
the prison population doesn’t seem to be very effective in the USA where 19% of prisoners claim to have been assaulted by other inmates and 21% claim to be
victims of prison staff. Up to 9% of the male prison population claim to have
been sexually assaulted behind bars – that equates to 180,000 male victims. The
chances of a female prisoner being sexually assaulted are even higher.
Although, women make up just 7% of the US prison population they account for
22% of prisoner-on-prisoner sexual violence and 33% of staff-on-prisoner sexual
violence.

At the Winn Correctional Center, immediate force is used
by prison staff 40 times more frequently than at other similar sized
institutions and yet it still experienced 12 stabbings in two-months and 114
weapons were found, which is three-times as many as at other similar sized
institutions.

In my opinion, prison officers call for more weaponry is
misjudged. What the prison service needs it more prison officers. The government
promised an extra 2,500 prison officers last November but so far it doesn’t
look as if any have been delivered. If you read the final paragraph of this story,
which is also where many of the quotes I’ve used come from, you’ll note that
the Ministry of Justice reminds us of its promise to provide more staff, had
they recruited any significant numbers you’d think they would have told us
about it!

But let’s put that 2,500 in perspective anyway because
since 2010 there has been a cull of 7,000 prison officers, meaning that even
with the promised new staff the prison service will still be 4,500 officers
below its strength in 2010!

I would suggest that what is needed is not more weapons
but either more prison officers or fewer prisoners.

Too few staff (or too many prisoners for the available
staff) means people are not searched properly on arrival at prison and the
walls cannot be properly patrolled meaning drugs, phones and other contraband
can sneak it – or just be thrown over the wall! Too few staff also means that
prisoners cannot be treated properly inside the prison so it is harder to work
with them, monitor them and generally do all the things prison officers should
be doing.

So, while the prison service could tool up its staff
experience from other jurisdictions suggests that may do little to kerb
violence in prisons, which isn’t a surprise since it seems pretty common sense
to treat the cause of a problem rather than the symptoms. In this case, the
cause is drugs and a lack of staff to properly police the prisons. The cure is
to either give the prison service the staff necessary to do the job or cut back
on the number of people in prison. The problem with the first is that the government
has cut back in so many areas that to restore them all to an effective level is
now prohibitively expensive and reducing the prison population never goes down
well with the tabloids or Tory party members

How do you effectively reduce the prison population? You
sentence more people to community sentences and let probation do their thing to
prevent future offending. The only problem with that is that the government has
cut probation and botched the privatisation of probation services by fibbing to
bidding companies about how much money they could make and so causing them to
reduce staff, which in turn inhibits their ability to address reoffending.

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